Access Utah

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"All The Wild That Remains" on Monday's Access Utah Apr 20, 2015

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Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, in his book “All The Wild That Remains,” nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these remarkable men from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, interweaving their stories and asking how they speak to the issues that confront the West today.

"Literary Industries" on Friday's Access Utah Apr 17, 2015

Show notes

A bookseller in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, Hubert Howe Bancroft rose to define the early history of California and the West. Creating what he called a “history factory,” he assembled a vast library of over sixty thousand books, maps, letters, and documents. In 1890 he published an eight-hundred-page autobiography, titled "Literary Industries." Today on the program Sheri Quinn talks to his great great granddaugher Kim Bancroft. She edited all 800 pages in the modern abridged edition of "Literary Industries: Chasing the Vanishing West."

Should Spanking Children Be Forbidden? We'll Discuss on Thursday's Access Utah Apr 16, 2015

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Should Spanking Children Be Forbidden in the U.S.? Renowned criminologist Christian Pfeiffer from University of Hannover, Germany will present the European experience on Thursday, as a part of the USU Provost's Series on Instructional Excellence, and will join us for Thursday's AU.Dr. Pfeiffer's research interests include the role of religion and child rearing practices in the production of violence; the role of media in the lives of children and in the perception of crime and criminal policy; media consumption and violence; the implications of corporal punishment in politics; and extrajudicial dispute resolution.

Talking About Sex On Wednesday's Access Utah Apr 15, 2015

Show notes

In her song "Flawless," the singer Beyonce samples Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are." On Wednesday's AU we'll ask: Can the message of female empowerment co-exist with a sexualized image? Do advertising messages of companies like Carl's Jr. and Sports Illustrated promote the objectification of women? If so, how should those messages be corrected? How should we frame the topic of sex in the media, in the classroom, in the family, in society?

"The Never-Open Desert Diner" On Tuesday's Access Utah Apr 14, 2015

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Ben Jones, is a single, 38-year-old truck driver on the verge of losing his small trucking company. Ben's route takes him back and forth across one of the most desolate and beautiful regions of the Utah desert where he meets a mysterious cellist and the embittered owner of a small diner. That's the plot, in brief, of James Anderson's debut novel, "The Never-Open Desert Diner."

"Where Roads Will Never Reach" On Monday's Access Utah Apr 13, 2015

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In 2014 the citizens of Idaho and Montana celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act – the law that secured protection for eight million acres of wild forests and mountains in these two states. In his new book (from University of Utah Press) “Where Roads Will Never Reach” environmental historian Frederick Swanson tells the story of how, decades before the Wilderness Act, ordinary citizens halted the federal government’s resource development juggernaut of the 1950s and 1960s, safeguarding some of the last strongholds of grizzly bear, mountain goat, elk, trout, salmon and steelhead. Swanson says that from Idaho's Frank Church-River of No Return to Montana's Scapegoat and Great Bear, the wilderness areas of the Northern Rockies serve as a record of lasting public concern and as a model for citizens working to protect today's threatened landscapes.

The Family Acceptance Project on Thursday's Access Utah Apr 09, 2015

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What happens to a Mormon family in California when their teenage son tells them he's gay? How does the family navigate questions of faith and acceptance? The film "Families Are Forever" produced by the Family Acceptance Project and screened recently at Utah State University, tells the story of Tom and Wendy Montgomery and their five children, focusing on their son, Jordan. Participating in USU's Research Week, Wendy Montgomery joined Dr. Caitlin Ryan of San Francisco State University to discuss the Family Acceptance Project - a research, intervention, education and policy project founded by Dr. Ryan to help diverse families support their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) children. The Family Acceptance Project seeks to prevent health risks like suicide and homelessness and to promote well-being in the context of families, cultures and faith communities.

"The Lost World of the Old Ones" on Wednesday's Access Utah Apr 08, 2015

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In 2005, David Roberts and two of his mountaineering friends caught sight of what appeared to be a granary beneath an overhanging cliff a thousand feet above a Utah ranch. After rappelling down the cliff, Roberts and his companions discovered a settlement--and a mystery. This enormous granary was large enough to hold fifty-seven bushels of corn, weighing a ton and a half. Yet Roberts and his friends--some of the most experienced climbers in the world--had enormous difficulty reaching the site. In fact, they were the first people to reach the remote site in more than seven hundred years. How could the ancient natives have managed to lug so much grain up this sheer cliff, especially considering there is no conclusive evidence that they possessed rope technology? For more than 5,000 years the Ancestral Puebloans occupied the Four Corners region. Just before 1300 AD, they abandoned their homeland in a migration that remains one of prehistory's greatest puzzles. Northern and southern neighbors of the Ancestral Puebloans, the Fremont and Mogollon likewise flourished for millennia before migrating or disappearing. Fortunately, the Old Ones, as some of their present-day descendants call them, left behind awe-inspiring ruins, dazzling rock art, and sophisticated artifacts ranging from painted pots to woven baskets.

The Perfect Language on Tuesday's Access Utah Apr 07, 2015

Show notes

USU Philosophy Professor Charlie Huenemann, writing for 3quarksdaily.com says that "we all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too...What is left unsaid speaks volumes. We might resign ourselves to this fact - the inescapable limits of what's sayable - but in fact a great many minds have sought to construct the perfect language."

"Ongoingness: The End of a Diary" on Monday's Access Utah Apr 06, 2015

Show notes

In "Ongoingness: The End of a Diary" Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. She says she wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened. But she was terrified that she might forget something, she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. "Ongoingness" is a spare, meditative work standing in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary. In this collection of essays, Manguso confronts issues of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us.

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